Chapter 32 Zatanna
ZATANNA
For a second, I feel it.
That old, crawling sensation at the back of my neck. Like someone’s watching. Not just looking in my direction. Watching.
It comes out of nowhere, sharp enough to make me pause mid-breath. I glance toward the window.
Nothing.
Just rain-slicked glass, reflections from the street, a couple passing under one umbrella, headlights smearing across the wet pavement. No one standing there. No familiar face. No dark suit. No impossible man staring at me through the glass.
My heartbeat takes a second to settle.
Pregnancy has made me weirdly alert about everything. Sounds, smells, people getting too close. Maybe it’s that. Maybe it’s eight months of carrying a child while trying not to think too hard about who his father is and what that means.
Or maybe I’m just tired. As always.
“Hey,” Jake says. “You with me?”
I turn back to him and force a smile.
Jake is leaning against the counter with a takeout coffee in one hand and his messenger bag hanging off one shoulder, all messy curls and producer glasses and the kind of concerned face he’s been making at me for months now.
He shouldn’t have stuck around. Not after I vanished.
Not after I stopped recording for him right when my voice was bringing in the most money it ever had.
But he did.
Strangely supportive does not even begin to cover it.
He didn’t ask too many questions when I called and told him I needed a hiatus.
He didn’t push when I said I was done with audio for now.
He just offered me shifts at his sister’s coffee shop, told me I could work the register if I didn’t want to talk much, and every few weeks asked if I was writing anything new.
Which is how I ended up here. Eight months pregnant, in an apron, smelling like espresso all day and spending my nights writing a very filthy novel I may never show anyone.
Life is weird.
“Sorry,” I say, shifting my weight a little because my back is killing me today. “Just tired.”
Jake glances at my stomach. “You are carrying around a whole human. I think that’s allowed.”
I smile despite myself and rest a hand over the curve of my belly. He moves when I do, a slow solid stretch that still startles me sometimes.
Seven months.
Heavily pregnant now. No hiding it, no pretending it’s just the angle of a sweater. My body entered the room before I did weeks ago, and I’ve given up trying to disappear behind oversized clothes and strategic tote bags.
Jake follows my glance toward the window. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah,” I say. Then, because he’s earned more honesty than that, “I just keep getting the feeling someone’s there.”
He looks over his shoulder. “Anyone specific?”
No. That’s the problem.
Everyone and no one.
I shrug. “Probably nothing.”
He studies me for a second, then nods like he doesn’t believe me but is kind enough not to say so. “Sit down for five minutes before your feet file a formal complaint.”
“I’m fine.”
“You say that every single time, and every single time you look like you’re about to throw a croissant at me.”
“That happened once.”
“It was very hostile.”
“It was stale.”
That gets the laugh I wanted, and the air between us lightens again.
I lower myself into the chair across from him with all the dignity of a woman whose center of gravity has completely betrayed her. He watches with open amusement.
“So,” he says, “how’s the book?”
I huff out a breath. “Actually good.”
“Actually?”
“Annoyingly good. Which is frustrating because that means I might have to finish it.”
He grins. “You’re welcome.”
“I haven’t thanked you.”
“You gave me chapter six. That was thanks.”
Heat crawls into my face. “You were not supposed to read it that fast.”
“It had knife-play tension and a morally compromised billionaire. I had no choice.”
I roll my eyes, but he’s not wrong.
The book came out of nowhere, really. Or maybe it didn’t.
Maybe it came out of everything I’ve been trying not to say for months.
A man with too much power. A woman with too much to lose.
Cities, danger, wanting, shame, obsession.
I keep changing details, changing names, changing outcomes, but if I’m honest, there’s a pulse in it that came from somewhere real.
I do not think about that too long.
Jake takes a drink of coffee and says, lighter now, “You know he came looking for you.”
I go still. Not because I didn’t know.
Because I did. I just wish I didn’t.
“I know,” I say.
Jake nods slowly. “At the studio first. Then again a couple weeks later. Didn’t come in yelling or anything. Just asked questions in that terrifying calm way rich men do when they know everyone will tell them something eventually.”
I stare at the table.
My fingers tighten around the paper cup in my hands.
I had heard about it after the fact. From one of the sound guys, then from Jake, then from the landlord in my old building who suddenly remembered a “very intense gentleman” asking after me.
I didn’t care. Or at least that’s what I told myself.
I had already decided by then: I wasn’t going back. Not to him. Not to that office. Not to that world full of bodyguards and blood ties and men who could order entire lives around with one phone call.
Not even if he came looking. Especially not then.
“I’m not going back,” I say quietly.
Jake lifts a brow. “I didn’t ask.”
“I know.”
“You just looked like you needed to say it.”
Maybe I did. I rest both hands on my belly now, feeling the pressure, the weight, the very real consequence of every choice I made back then.
“I’m not a part of that world,” I say.
Jake doesn’t answer right away. When he does, it’s careful. “You kind of are.”
I look up sharply.
He raises both hands. “Not by choice. I get it. But Zee, city gossip has been feral for months. Warehouses hit, people switching sides, some finance war in a suit, whatever rich criminals call civil unrest. Even I’ve heard his name more than once.”
My stomach tightens. I have heard it too.
Little things. Fragments. A shooting in Queens.
A fire in a storage yard in Jersey. Security stepped up in neighborhoods that don’t usually need it.
And always that same undertone in the stories, like something bigger is happening under the surface and regular people are just catching sparks from it.
I’ve tried not to listen. Tried not to wonder.
But of course, I have wondered.
And sometimes, in the worst moments, I’ve wondered if it’s because of me.
If Aleksei’s life got worse because I left. If my disappearance solved one problem and created another. Or if that’s just vanity, and men like them would be setting cities on fire whether I existed or not.
Jake watches me too closely. “You think any of that has something to do with you?”
I look away. “That would be stupid.”
“That is not a no.”
I let out a slow breath. “I don’t know.”
That’s the truth.
I don’t know anything except that I left because staying would have swallowed me whole. Because when everything blew up at the office, I had one clear instinct for once in my life and it was run.
Because I was pregnant and humiliated and in love with a man I had known for barely any time at all, and that combination felt less romantic than fatal.
I was not going to raise a child in the middle of his family war.
I was not going to become another woman folded into the Vasiliev machine because a man looked at me hard enough to blur my judgment.
And I was definitely not going to wait around while he chose a wife with me in the background like some disposable, shameful side note.
So I left.
I got smaller. Quieter. Found a cheaper apartment. Took barista shifts. Wrote at night. Stopped recording. Kept my head down. Built a little life that fit in my own two hands.
“I’m not sorry I left,” I say finally.
Jake nods. “Okay.”
“But I…” I stop.
He waits.
I press my lips together, then let the sentence come out ugly and true. “I hate that some part of me still wants him to have looked harder.”
Jake’s expression softens in that annoying, human way people do when they’re being decent. “Yeah,” he says quietly. “That tracks.”
I laugh once, because if I don’t laugh I might cry and that would be deeply embarrassing in the middle of a half-empty café.
Outside, a siren cuts through the street and fades again.
I look toward the window one more time. That feeling has gone.
Or maybe it hasn’t. Maybe I’ve just gotten too good at carrying it.
Jake stands and picks up his bag. “I should go before I start helping myself to pastries and your boss fires you.”
“I am very close to firing myself.”
“Please don’t. My sister likes you.”
I smile and push myself upright again.
He leans in and presses a quick kiss to the top of my head. “Text me when you get home.”
“I’m twenty-seven. Not twelve.”
“Pregnant, stubborn, and weirdly unlucky with powerful men. So yes. Text me.”
I make a face at him, but he’s already walking backward toward the door.
A few days pass.
Enough for the weird feeling at the back of my neck to fade into background noise again. Enough for me to do what I have gotten very good at doing these past months:
Keep moving.
I go to work.
I steam milk, ring up commuters, smile at regulars, pretend my lower back doesn’t feel like it’s being held together with chewing gum and bad intentions.
One customer tells me I’m glowing. Another asks if I’m having a boy or girl.
I lie and say I want the surprise because I’m tired of strangers acting like my body is public property.
I go to a doctor’s appointment.
The waiting room smells like disinfectant and stale magazines.
The baby is healthy. Strong heartbeat. Good growth.
The doctor tells me to rest more, which is funny because apparently, she thinks I am someone with access to rest. I nod dutifully anyway and take the printout of measurements and recommendations I will probably ignore by tomorrow.
I go home. I write.